Talking about structured light 3D sensors, InVisage QuantumFilm global shutter works in tune with a pulsed LED, which optimizes the LED battery usage to be just 10 mW (versus 750 mW for LEDs used with rolling shutter NIR cameras). SparkP2’s fast global shutter allows the NIR light source to be pulsed for extremely short intervals instead of remaining continuously illuminated, thus overcoming sunlight while at the same time capturing movement more accurately and using far less net power.

SparkP2 is sampling in April 2016 with mass production scheduled by Summer 2016.

Brian O’Rourke, Senior Principal Analyst, Consumer Devices and MEMS & Sensors at IHS Technology, said in an email to VentureBeat, “There’s certainly opportunity here for InVisage. The types of use cases that they’re going after, such as facial and iris recognition, depth-mapping and eye and gesture tracking, have a wide variety of imaging applications, from security to online banking to gaming. These will all benefit from better performance in the IR range. These applications should grow significantly over the next few years, from a limited current base. The barrier for InVisage is the strong, established companies that they will be competing against in the image sensor market, companies like Sony, Samsung, OmniVision and ON Semiconductor. As a start-up, it’s extremely difficult to compete against companies that currently generate billions of dollars in revenue in your target market. You not only have to build a better mouse trap, but you have to be able to market it effectively.”

Global shutter, very short depth and power savings are big advantages in the target market. Uniformity maybe not such an issue at 2mp. Long term stability a big problem where colour is critical such as stills but less of an issue in a mono sensor with a short device lifetime.

I remember their film is made of somthing like PbSe Qdots, which means better for longer wave length, so this might be their position in market, just think at this or longer wavelength, their sensitivity is 100 times than silicon although their noise is also 100 times.

Some biometric NIR applications with active illumination (like some among those mentioned in the post) are mostly shot noise limited in SNR. So for such applications QE may well be more important even at the cost of additional read noise for example - it all depends on the application. Anyway without numbers we have no idea what the QE nor the noise really is.In any case, this is at least an application where the quantum film - if it lives up to its claims (obviously still to be proven) probably has a better chance to make a break than in traditional markets.If the competition is at <8% QE with awful crosstalk then at least there is something to potentially improve on...